"With Schumann's Symphonic Etudes, Himy revealed his true talents: a prodigious muscular power and emotional forcefulness. Under Himy's hands, the variations were rapturously emotional, a veritable tidal wave of successive and rapidly altering emotions. The listener, knowing that by 1840 Schumann was displaying obvious signs of the mental instability that would require him to spend the final years of his life under institutional care, sensed a noble mind already being wrenched apart by competing emotions."